I am looking for tips on how to get started, maybe some reading material, terms to research, or better yet something to reverse engineer.

The basic concept of what me and my group would like to achieve is:
take the patch cord to USB dongle that comes with Rocksmith,
write the device drivers to play the audio from the guitar through PC speakers.

Basically the only thing we know so far is that the guitar outputs a small analog electric signal.
Not even sure where to begin.

It has to be written in C.

/edit

Can be done for Windows or Linux. Whatever is easier.

This post was edited by ROM on Mar 10 2016 08:29pm

im sure i'll get a lot of flak for this, but IMO you should always pick something you already know how to do for a school project. if you dont already know it, pick something where there are tons of resources available. dont buy into the hype of "challenge yourself" when your grade depends on it; save that for a personal project.

I found this article, might be helpful:
http://www.timelordz.com/blog/2011/12/from-rocksmith-to-free-guitar-effects-and-home-studio-recording/

Kind of cheesy but probably good advise.

Thanks.

It's not bad advice. It's the quagmire that your grades in school are arbitrary, its supposed to be about learning, but that job you want will be based on the arbitrary grades in your transcript. So better to not get invested in something we will never finish.

We'll explore this for a while because it would be quite an impressive project. We understand c, low level programming, and Linux.

This post was edited by ROM on Mar 11 2016 07:45am

I support that completely. There is no reason to gamble. Pick something you are proficient at and showcase what you know.

Sp guess of an update, we dropped the idea completely for a couple reasons.

The cord itself has the ADC converter in it, which is all well, didn't want to build that circuitry anyways. So the computer recognizes the signal as a realtone, meaning it picks it up as microphone input. So basically no need to make anything.

I think we finally set on an idea.

We are going to try to incorporate photodiode with the raspberry pi testing breadboard and try to sense ambient light and send a script to a pc when the lights are off. Then just spin it as some energy saving device in hopes the teacher will eat it up.

could prob put a little webserver on it and set it up so you can turn your lights off and on from remote over internet. Based on the conversation so far I imagine this would be a rather simple task for you, but would prob impress the hell out of a technopeasant teacher.